Cicero on Epicurean Friendship: a Reappraisal 109

Cicero on Epicurean Friendship: A Reappraisal 109 POLITEIA VOL. 1, No 2, SPRING 2019 APPENDIX CICERO ON EPICUREAN FRIENDSHIP: A REAPPRAISAL Phillip Mitsis New York University Given the occasion, I thought I might take the opportunity to revisit my first pub- lished paper on Epicureanism1 originally begun in a Lucretius seminar at Cornell in 1978 taught by Elizabeth Asmis. The paper's argument now seems to me in retrospect to exhibit a certain naive confidence in Cicero's reliability as a source, and though I still stand by some of its overall conclusions about Epicurean friendship, my views about the nature of the path that one needs to take to get to those conclusions has changed considerably.2 Readers will best judge whether a forty-year gap in looking at these arguments, apart from merely complicating matters, has led to any progress. At De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum 1.65-70, Cicero, through the character of Tor- quatus, offers our most detailed and seemingly systematic surviving account of Epi- curean views of friendship. Brad Inwood has forcefully reminded us, however, that this work has a particular focus and that its overall structure and arguments clearly reflect it.3 Cicero is examining what the fines (limits, ends, criteria, etc.) of goods and of evils are in various rival philosophical theories and in the first two books he sets himself the project of presenting and criticizing the Epicurean claim that pleasure serves as a final end or goal of our actions. One recurring problem in his account is that he glosses the notion of finis with terms having different valences and, thus, those wishing to extract from Cicero's discussion Epicurus' original view of friendship are faced with the problem that he often describes the relation of friendship to pleasure in terminology imprecise enough to encompass different theoretical outlooks. By the same token, his discussion presents several further formidable obstacles and again no consensus has emerged about how to overcome them.4 One problem is that from the outset we are confronted with descriptions of friendship in a Latin vocabulary that are often emotionally charged5 in a way reminiscent of, say, Montaigne speaking about his friendship with La Boétie. This is aided, no doubt, by the perceived etymological connections between amicitia and amor that Cicero plays on (cf. De Amicitia 8). We cannot assume, of course, that this directly captures the particular emotional nuances of Epicurus' original Greek. Perhaps the most difficult and problematic feature of Cicero's presentation, however, is that it is structured around the claim that true friendship requires us to love Phillip Mitsis 110 friends as much as ourselves (e.g. aeque amicos et nosmet ipsos diligamus . Fin.1.67). Some would argue that this shows that Cicero is viewing questions of Epicu- rean friendship through the lens of solidifying professional disputes over generations both within and without Epicurean circles. On the other hand, Alain Gigandet,6 in a brilliant intervention, has made a strong case for these philosophical controversies going back to Epicurus himself, though not necessarily in this exact form. It is this slippage, however, between Cicero's preoccupations and the original wider context of these philosophical questions, along with the inexactness of Cicero's vocabulary and potential distortions of his rhetorical methods that continues to bedevil contemporary scholarship. What is clear, however, is that Cicero relentlessly uses the requirement of friends loving one another as much as themselves throughout his criticism of Epicurean views (2.82-86) and in the service of his overall argument that hedonism is incompatible with the normative fabric of Roman ethical and political life.7 Even if some Epicu- reans think they can meet this requirement for friendship, he claims, they are being inconsistent with their overall commitment to hedonism, while others come to real- ize this and give up hedonism in order to save their commitments to true friendship. Again, we have no direct evidence that such a requirement ever served as this kind of lynchpin in Epicurus' original account. Moreover, it is hard not to be suspicious of the notion of any Epicureans giving up hedonism. Thus, one might certainly wonder whether Cicero is constructing and reifying Epicurean "positions" in order to be able to go after them later in his own response with a very blunt cleaver. To be sure, Torquatus' presentation of these positions sometimes seems to present actual points of contact with surviving texts of Epicurus. Unfortunately, attempts to show precise correspondences are mostly frustrating. For example, he claims that Epicurean friends will rejoice in their friends' joy as much as their own and be equally pained by their anguish (1.67-68). At SV 56 we find the claim that the wise man will suffer (Ἀλγεῖ μὲν ὁ σοφὸς) no more than a friend who is being tortured. However literally we are meant to take Epicurus' claim here, it is perhaps plausible to infer sym- metrical attitudes on the part of a sage to his friend's pleasures as well. We might therefore conclude that Torquatus is correctly reflecting a general position of Epicurus himself in saying that a wise man will feel in the same way towards his friend as he does towards himself (Quocirca eodem modo sapiens erit affectus erga amicum quo in se ipsum . Fin. 68 ff). Not all scholars would be willing to make such an infer- ence, however, without a more secure and directly corresponding text. Moreover, it is an even greater jump from the affective claim that one will feel a friend's pain no more than one's own to the general evaluative claim that Epicureans will value or, in Cicero's terminology, "love" friends as much as themselves. This is fairly typical of the elusive nature of Torquatus' account. He seems to sometimes draw near to known texts of Epicurus, but none of the major positions he outlines maps directly on to them. Nor, unfortunately, does his exposition straightforwardly fill in gaps that might help us put those texts coherently together with any confidence. Cicero on Epicurean Friendship: A Reappraisal 111 Torquatus begins his exposition by saying that friendship has been debated by Epicureans in three ways (1.66). Many have taken this to mean that there was a dis- pute among Epicureans themselves and that the three positions Torquatus presents are meant to represent reified factions or historical layers within the Epicurean school. This again seems open to question, I think, since the three positions do not necessarily conflict and to a certain extent seem to address different aspects of friendship and different kinds of friends. It might just as well be the case that these three "positions" have been extracted from a variety of argumentative contexts and from arguments that Epi- curus and later Epicureans used in the course of their debates with rival schools. Cice- ro seems to take particular relish, for instance, in the claim that the second Epicurean position on friendship appears to have conceded a crucial criticism of the Academics (1.69). Yet, this supposed position overlaps with the two other accounts in key ways and, unlike them, it offers a causal empirical explanation of the origins of friendship of the sort one could imagine in an Epicurean text dealing with the psychological, social, and historical origins of friendship. It is not certain, then, that these three "positions" are anything more than constructions by Cicero based on a selective presentation of Epicurean arguments taken out of their immediate context. We can make a parallel with Epicurus' account of justice. In trying to show how the virtues are compatible with hedonism, Torquatus emphasizes that, like the rest of the virtues, justice is connected to a life of pleasure and tranquility. This aretaic conception of virtue as a virtuous trait of character has correspondences in Epicurus' theory (Ad Men. 132), but in other sources, Epicurus develops a contractual theory of justice.8 The relation of these two strands of Epicurus' thinking about justice is left unexplored in Cicero's account, but it would be easy to construct a kind of Epicurean disputatio of the following form: "some say justice is a contract", while "others, giving in to Stoic criticism, say it is an inner virtue exemplified by sages," and "a third group says that justice has its empirical/historical origins in rival groups beginning to feel pity for each others' children" (cf. DRN 5. 1119-1123). These three attested positions about justice show something important about Epicurus' overall theory, yet however ultimately consistent, they hardly represent distinct positions of three competing historical Epicurean groups. Of the three positions on friendship described by Torquatus, the first is one that many scholars have taken to best capture at least some elements of Epicurus' original position, though it is itself problematic as set out, and Cicero only says (2.82) that he seemed (mihi videbar) to recognize a dictum of Epicurus himself in it. This is further complicated by the fact that the initial part of the dictum he recognizes--that friendship cannot be sundered from pleasure--is said by Torquatus to hold for all three positions at a general level both as he opens and closes his exposition (cf. 1.70, without pleasure "no principle (institutionem) for friendship can be found."). Cicero, however, continues with what seems to be an allusion to KD 289 and a polemical one at that, and further links this general principle to the claim that without friends one cannot live in safety and without fear--which parallels the criticism one sees figuring prominently, Phillip Mitsis 112 say, in later Stoic sources such as Seneca.10 In any case, Cicero goes beyond what KD 28 explicitly says to the extent that we may have reason to suspect that he is only mak- ing use of the pretense of an allusion for his own purposes and to anchor a common charge made by Epicurus' opponents.

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